It’s mid-October in San Francisco, and a crowd of 200 or so congregants—some seated in pews, others standing below cathedral windows at the back—bow their heads in prayer. Over cranberry-apple cosmos and plates of Burmese food served by black-shirted waiters, a DJ plays a thumping soundtrack of remixed worship music. This is not a church service or even a Bible study. It is, instead, an entirely new kind of event in Silicon Valley.
We are here to listen in on a conversation between Dr. Francis S. Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the Human Genome Project, and Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Silicon Valley’s influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, which has hatched thousands of tech companies with a combined valuation of more than $600 billion. The event is called Code & Cosmos, and its underlying thesis is that the fields of science and technology, once considered diametrically opposed to religion and spirituality, might converge with the teachings of the Bible. In other words, business networking for the spiritually curious.
“What is the real basis of morality?” Collins asks the crowd. “Why am I here? What happens after I die?” Collins, a thin, owlish man, gazes solemnly at the crowd, which already seems to have a sense of where this is going. “Science,” he says, “can’t really give you an answer.” But there is another answer to these questions, and it has to do with one Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom Collins encountered as a 20-something medical student grappling with the limits of atheism. Ever since, he said, “I’ve never really hit a situation where what I know as a rigorous scientist and what I believe as a Christ-centered Christian are in conflict.”
“I GUARANTEE YOU,” ONE CHRISTIAN ENTREPRENEUR TOLD ME, “THERE ARE PEOPLE THAT ARE LEVERAGING CHRISTIANITY TO GET CLOSER TO PETER THIEL.”
That this conversation is taking place not at a church but in Tan’s home—which, incidentally, happens to be a converted church a stone’s throw from Dolores Park—may seem, as Tan tells us from the stage, “a little bit unusual.” There was a time, Tan says, when such a gathering would be “maybe even reviled in San Francisco.” Many in the room, myself included, remember vividly the period to which Tan is referring. It was a time not so very long ago, mostly in the 2010s, when Silicon Valley cultivated a stance of pointed hostility not only toward conservatism but to the Protestant doctrines that underpin much of American life. For many years, the running joke—popularized by the HBO show Silicon Valley—was that in the Bay Area, Christianity was “borderline illegal.”
Part of the problem is that for most of Silicon Valley’s existence, its overarching monoculture privileged a certain type of “smart person.” It was the kind of smart person who campaigned for Barack Obama, marched for gay rights, and built a custom prayer stool to complement their priest fetish at the Folsom Street Fair. The subject of ethics was brought up frequently, but almost exclusively in the context of their nonmonogamous relationships. Black Lives Matter signs sprouted from their yards, and if they strayed beyond the strictures of atheism into spirituality, it was of the Eastern variety. Being Muslim was actually kind of cool, because if you were against that, you were probably xenophobic. And Judaism was all right too, because antisemitism was not yet in vogue.
You don’t need to do much guesswork to see why smart Christians in Silicon Valley are growing more emboldened. After all, there are billionaires among their ranks. One of them is Peter Thiel, who has spoken about his evangelical leanings for more than a decade and who has lately shared his views on his faith with increasing frequency. “I believe in the resurrection of Christ,” he said in a 2020 talk. “The only good role model for us is Christ.” (In watching talk after talk of Thiel speaking about his faith, I found myself genuinely puzzled, not because Thiel lacks conviction but because his thoughts on the subject are so galaxy-brained that it seems like he’s playing a game of 3D chess that the rest of us are only catching up to: “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.”)
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We are here to listen in on a conversation between Dr. Francis S. Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the Human Genome Project, and Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Silicon Valley’s influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, which has hatched thousands of tech companies with a combined valuation of more than $600 billion. The event is called Code & Cosmos, and its underlying thesis is that the fields of science and technology, once considered diametrically opposed to religion and spirituality, might converge with the teachings of the Bible. In other words, business networking for the spiritually curious.
“What is the real basis of morality?” Collins asks the crowd. “Why am I here? What happens after I die?” Collins, a thin, owlish man, gazes solemnly at the crowd, which already seems to have a sense of where this is going. “Science,” he says, “can’t really give you an answer.” But there is another answer to these questions, and it has to do with one Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom Collins encountered as a 20-something medical student grappling with the limits of atheism. Ever since, he said, “I’ve never really hit a situation where what I know as a rigorous scientist and what I believe as a Christ-centered Christian are in conflict.”
“I GUARANTEE YOU,” ONE CHRISTIAN ENTREPRENEUR TOLD ME, “THERE ARE PEOPLE THAT ARE LEVERAGING CHRISTIANITY TO GET CLOSER TO PETER THIEL.”
That this conversation is taking place not at a church but in Tan’s home—which, incidentally, happens to be a converted church a stone’s throw from Dolores Park—may seem, as Tan tells us from the stage, “a little bit unusual.” There was a time, Tan says, when such a gathering would be “maybe even reviled in San Francisco.” Many in the room, myself included, remember vividly the period to which Tan is referring. It was a time not so very long ago, mostly in the 2010s, when Silicon Valley cultivated a stance of pointed hostility not only toward conservatism but to the Protestant doctrines that underpin much of American life. For many years, the running joke—popularized by the HBO show Silicon Valley—was that in the Bay Area, Christianity was “borderline illegal.”
Part of the problem is that for most of Silicon Valley’s existence, its overarching monoculture privileged a certain type of “smart person.” It was the kind of smart person who campaigned for Barack Obama, marched for gay rights, and built a custom prayer stool to complement their priest fetish at the Folsom Street Fair. The subject of ethics was brought up frequently, but almost exclusively in the context of their nonmonogamous relationships. Black Lives Matter signs sprouted from their yards, and if they strayed beyond the strictures of atheism into spirituality, it was of the Eastern variety. Being Muslim was actually kind of cool, because if you were against that, you were probably xenophobic. And Judaism was all right too, because antisemitism was not yet in vogue.
You don’t need to do much guesswork to see why smart Christians in Silicon Valley are growing more emboldened. After all, there are billionaires among their ranks. One of them is Peter Thiel, who has spoken about his evangelical leanings for more than a decade and who has lately shared his views on his faith with increasing frequency. “I believe in the resurrection of Christ,” he said in a 2020 talk. “The only good role model for us is Christ.” (In watching talk after talk of Thiel speaking about his faith, I found myself genuinely puzzled, not because Thiel lacks conviction but because his thoughts on the subject are so galaxy-brained that it seems like he’s playing a game of 3D chess that the rest of us are only catching up to: “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.”)
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